Grand jury report not an easy read

It's not that I was shocked by the insights into the "jail culture" offered by the report from the Orange County District Attorney's office after a special grand jury investigation into the 2006 beating death of an Orange County Jail inmate. Over the past three decades, I've observed and written about numerous prisons and jails, so the cultural revelations weren't surprising.

Inmate "shot-callers" using physical assaults - known as "taxing" - to keep other inmates in line. Division of inmates by racial groups - "woods" (short for “peckerwoods,” Southern slang for idiots) for whites, "Southsiders" for U.S.-born Hispanics, and so on. Attacks on suspected child molesters, known as "chesters," as in "Chester the Molester." Such things are commonplace in every prison and large jail in America.

Nor was I surprised to read that at least in some respects it was inmates, not deputies, who ran the system. It's not right, and it's against official policy, but in an environment in which inmates far outnumber the people guarding them, it's a hard reality. In the Orange County Jail system, the nation's 10th largest, at any given time there is only one deputy or special officer for every 34 inmates - and that's on paper. In reality, at the scene, sometimes the inmate-to-officer ratio is two or three times that.

As one sheriff's special officer told the grand jury, "The inmates do run the jail system. There (are) more inmates than deputies."

So again, I wasn't surprised by all of that. But was what appalling to me in the report was that some deputies at the Theo Lacy jail facility apparently had grossly violated not only official policies, but their sworn oaths as law enforcement officers. Sleeping on duty. Falsifying reports. Reportedly text-messaging and watching an episode of "Cops" on a TV in a guard station while 68 feet away an inmate was beaten for up to 50 minutes by a swarm of other inmates.

If that's true - and the grand jury offers compelling evidence that it is - then those deputies betrayed not only the taxpayers but every man and woman in the Orange County Sheriff's Department, many of whom I know and admire, who is doing his or her job faithfully and honorably in the jails and on the streets.

And I also take it personally.

About a year ago I wrote a column headlined "Don't Be Conned by Jail Tales." The column was partly in response to investigative news stories by some of my Register colleagues about the beating death of the aforementioned inmate, John Chamberlain, 41, who had been arrested but not yet convicted for allegedly possessing child pornography.

In that column I implied that my colleagues were overreacting to the jail homicide, brutal as it was, and that they were giving too much credence to whiny inmates and greedy lawyers. And I pointed out some more positive facts about the Orange County jail system.

For example, I noted that the Chamberlain killing was the only murder in the jail in 19 years - which I now know to be incorrect. There were actually two homicides during that period.

I also noted that the Orange County jail ranked far better than other urban jails in terms of "in custody" deaths of inmates - which is true. According to figures in the DA's report, from 1988 through 2006 there was an average of just six "in custody" inmate deaths per year, from suicide, illness and injury - not an astonishing figure in a "community" with an average daily population of more than 6,000 people, many of whom are violent criminals or have physical, mental or substance abuse problems. And there have been many, many cases of jail deputies putting themselves at risk to prevent suicides or inmate-on-inmate murders.

Nevertheless, on the facts surrounding the Chamberlain story, my Register colleagues were right and I was wrong. And for that I apologize to them, and to you.

Now, a word of caution. As disturbing as the grand jury revelations are, we shouldn't suddenly start assuming that jail inmates are victims and jail deputies are villains. It's just not so. Nor should we think that changes in jail personnel and policies will fundamentally alter the brutal jail and prison culture. They won't. Whatever the failings of the deputies on duty that day, it was other inmates who beat that inmate to death.

Still, the report on the grand jury investigation was necessary reading.

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